Ngā Pouaka Rākau - Woodblocks
The first instruments I explored making were woodblocks and guiro. I aimed for mostly wooden percussive instruments in the project as I find them the most pleasing on the ear - too much metal can be hard going. We had some old 'Fascinating Rhythm Blocks' in the collection of instruments we hired from ONZA (Orff NZ Aotearoa), so I set about replicating these across a wider range of notes.
Of all the untuned percussion we use in the Orff approach, guiro are one of my favourites, probably because they are actually tuned! I like the little 2 toned guiro with a long and a short tube, so I wanted to try making a whole set of tuned guiro.
The round guiro in the picture above were my first attempt at this, but they took a long time to make (carving the grooves on a lathe and then tuning the chamber), plus I didn't have an easy source of wood (pine was a little too soft), so when I began making woodblocks with kwila as the tone wood I quickly turned to a new idea: using decking timber with grooves already in it! This created both instruments in one hit (or scrape!).
Woodblocks / guiro
Gluing them together - it helps to have the gear!
Once I'd experimented with a few different sizes of blocks and worked out their pitches, I made a whole set and carefully sawed slots in the sides to tune them to the notes I wanted. This set has one octave (C to C), plus a high D and E. I mounted them on a temporary backing in a way that they can be easily removed, as we often use a pentatonic scale in Orff music, taking away some notes to make it easier for tamariki to be successful in their music making.
The ability to remove notes easily and set up instruments in a pentatonic scale will be a feature of the sound garden, making it easier on the ears when students are playing randomly or out of sync with each other, and supporting success when playing as a group.
Te tangi a ngā pouaka - Woodblocks in action
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